2018 Topcoder UX/UI Design Workshop Medan Recap

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Next City and Brief City Tour

After the TCO18 Regional Event in Yogyakarta was complete, we—adroc, tgerring, fajar.mln and I—flew to Medan for another design workshop and arrived around midnight on Monday, August 13 and just before lunarkid, idblack, petetebe, and riopurba had landed in the evening along with other members from Medan who attend the event at Yogyakarta.

Design Workshop Medan

This year, STMIK Mikroskil was our host for Topcoder UI/UX Design Workshop Medan. Long story short, this private campus has been around for 11 years and is renown for robotic and competitive programming.

The workshop begin at 8:30 AM with check-in and registration. About 100 attendees were showing up. Most of our attendees came from Mikroskil’s students who’d like to know more about Topcoder.

Queue for Registration

Then the opening ceremonial kick off the design workshop by Head of STMIK Mikroskil, Mimpin Ginting. Later, Adam continued with a presentation to introduce Topcoder to the crowds, explaining why Topcoder is the best place to learn and grow their design, programming, and data-science skills.

He then continued with a brief workshop about user experience showing the real problem we have in life—the experience travelling in the airport. He begin with listing the pain-point that every traveller faces—long queues, screening and security checkpoint, flight delay, flight reschedule, or worse travelers needing to buy a new ticket for unseen consequences. Then he explained how the nightmare is reduced by a smart app that actively shows the stats of the flight on the phone and suggesting which action the travelers should take.

Because most of the students never heard of Topcoder and never had a chance to register or compete in any challenge, Adam invited the students to try a one hour Rapid UX 1 Challenge with a real problem and prize money. The problem was to design a dashboard that encourages the user to use a trash-picking service in a residential area. What kind of information important and should be displayed? Also what features should be added and how they interact with the dashboard.

After one hour of thinking and designing the dashboard, we then enjoyed our lunch and a members panel where fajar, idblack, riopurba and I answering all the question that came from students and new members that joined in on this event—while adroc and tgerring reviewed all the submissions. We got lots of questions from the students on how to get started on Topcoder, tips and trick, time management, tools and skill set that they should have.

After the member panel, Adam and Trevor presented the top submissions and gave their feedback before announcing the RUX-1 Challenge winner. They continued with Rapid UX 2 Challenge which is a continuation from previous challenge.

Medan Rapid UX 1 Winners

Now the problem was to give a problem to schedule a pickup from the app. What features should be added, eg. option to set daily, weekly, monthly or custom periodic trash pickup schedule, options to select their trash size and type of trash, how the user can enter their general information, view available/near by vendor to pick up user trash, and how much it will cost the user. This problem was unique because all of the attendees never heard of this kind of service and lots of them tried to shoot their ideas to solving the problem.

After attendees finished sending their submissions, while Adam and Trevor reviewing, we had special sharing session with abedavera—a living legend of Topcoder designer from Medan who won the Topcoder Open 5 times.

abedavera shares his journey

Later we had lunarkid—the first and longest copilot from Medan—sharing his first experience joining Topcoder and how his role is different. By having lunarkid, attendees learned that Topcoder has a different track for coding-and-algorithm-freak. He encouraged them to try to compete on the developer track since he began his journey in the design track but now focuses on development. Now he actively runs and manages challenges for both tracks.

lunarkid one of developer and design copilot sharing his journey on Topcoder

The workshop was wrapped up by winner announcement for Trendsetter Challenge and RUX 2 Challenge. All attendees were invited to having a photo session before leaving the venue.

Trendsetter challenge winners.

Medan Rapid UX 2 winners

Special thanks to Gunawan, Rinrin Meilani, Mikroskil’s students and staff that made this workshop a success. Also to fajar.mln who preparing this event from the very beginning—you rock, bang! See you around in next year for another Topcoder Regional Indonesia events and workshops.